Reprinted from POETRY Magazine by permission of Professor Turner and the publisher

This essay brings together an old subject, a new body of knowledge, and
a new scientific paradigm which have not previously been associated
with one another. The subject is poetic meter, a universal human
activity, which despite its universality and obvious importance in most
human cultures, has received very little attention from humanists,
except for the studies of a few literary prosodists, and virtually none
at all from science. The new body of knowledge consists in the
findings of that intense study of the human brain which has taken place
in the last few decades; the new scientific paradigm has been developed
by the International Society for the Study of Time. Its major
postulates are: that an understanding of time is fundamental to an
understanding of the real world; that time is not simple, but
composite; that time is a hierarchy of more and more complex
temporalities; that the more complex temporalities evolved as part of
the general evolution of the universe, and in a sense the evolution of
time constitutes the evolution of the universe; and that the
hierarchical character of time as we know it reflects and embodies the
various stages of its evolution.

The radically interdisciplinary nature of this essay is not simply a
consequence of the need to seek explanations across the boundaries of
different fields. It represents also a commitment and a belief on
the part of its authors. We are convinced not only that this type
of study will cast light on its specific subject (poetic meter), but
also that the scientific material will be reciprocally enhanced in
value, taking its place within a framework which gives it greater
predictive power; and we further believe that "understanding" itself
consists in just such a union of detailed knowledge with global
significance.

At this point it might be helpful to review the major characteristics
of human cortical information-processing, as it has been provisionally
determined by studies in perceptual psychology, brain-chemistry,
psychology, brain evolution, brain development, ethology, and cultural
anthropology. Individually, the characteristics of human
brain-activity which are listed below are commonplace and
uncontroversial for the most part; collectively, they constitute a new
picture of the human mind. This new picture replaces older,
simpler models of it, such as the unextended rational substance of
Descartes, the association-matrix of Locke, the tabula rasa of Hume,
the passive, reinforcement-driven animal of Skinner, and the
genetically hard-wired robot of the sociobiologists, though it does
include the elements which led those writers to construct their models.

Human information-processing is, on the crude level of individual
neurons, procrustean. That is, it reduces the information it gets
from the outside world to its own categories, and accepts reality's
answers only if they directly address its own set of questions.
In the macrocosm, our perception of electromagnetic radiation cuts out
all but heat and the visible spectrum; in the microcosm, a given neuron
in the visual cortex will fire only if certain characteristics-say, a
moving vertical light contrast-are met by the retinal image, and will
ignore all others. We possess, as it were, a certain domineering
and arrogant quality in our dealings with sensory information, and our
brain will "listen" only to replies to its own inquiries. In
quantum physics the familiar procrustean questions-Waves or particles?
Which slit did the photon pass through? Is this ray of light polarized
north-south or east-west?-force reality into a certainty and
definiteness which it did not naturally possess: and this insistence on
unambiguity is rooted in our neurons themselves.

Thus we may say that human information processing is, secondly,
determinative: that is, it insists on certainty and unambiguity, and is
thus at war with the probabilistic and indeterminate nature of the most
primitive and archaic components of the universe. This insistence
on definiteness, however, is in a grand tradition: matter itself is a
condition of energy which severely limits the probabilistic waywardness
of its elementary particles; large clumps of organized matter, like
crystals, have overcome much of the vagueness and unpredictability of
their primary constituents (though they pay for their certainty by
becoming liable to entropic decay). Indeed, the replication of
living matter could be said to be another stage in the suppression of
physical ambiguity, for it implies an exact continuity and stability of
structure which survives even the matter of which it is composed.
Thus the human neural insistence on determinateness is in line with a
general tendency of nature, and is related to the syllogistic
proposition that homeostatic systems tend to endure and survive.

Third, and in contrast to the "conservative" tendency we have just
described, the human nervous system seems designed to register
differences. It is habituative. That is, it tends to ignore
repeated and expected stimuli, and respond only to the new and
unexpected. Though it asks the questions, it is more interested
in odd answers than ordinary ones. Temporally it hears changes
and sees movements; spatially it sees contrasts and borderlines.
Deprived of its saccades, the eye sees nothing, for it sees no
differences.

Fourth, human nervous activity is fundamentally synthetic in its
aim. It seeks gestalts even when they are not there: and there is
a serious ontological question as to whether they do in fact come to
exist when we find them there.

It is (5) active rather than passive: it constructs scenarios to be
tested by reality, vigorously seeks confirmation of them, and painfully
reconstructs them if they are deconfirmed. The brain is at least
as much an organ of action as it is an organ of knowledge.

It is (6) predictive: the patterns it extrapolates or invents are
patterns which involve specific expectations of what will happen next,
and in the more distant future, expectation which await satisfaction
and are tested by the senses. Dreaming-it would seem from the
testimony of Shakespeare, Descartes, Kekule, and Freud-is the formative
stage of pattern-creation: out of dreams come A Midsummer Night's
Dream, skeptical philosophy, the benzene ring, and a viable ego.
So dominant is the human adaptation for predictive calculation that it
might be said the human senses exist as a check on our predictions
rather than, as in most other animals, triggers for appropriate
behavior.

The whole matter of prediction is very complex. One of us
(Poppel) has pointed out the relationship between prediction and
memory; indeed, he says, the adaptive function of memory is
prediction. Memory, however, would be useless in an entirely
random and indeterminate universe: therefore the very fact that the
metabolically expensive neural machinery of memory evolved and proved
adaptive is a kind of odd proof that the universe is at least locally
predictable, to justify such an investment.

But, on the other hand, an entirely deterministic and predictable
universe would have no use for memory, either. The Umwelt of the
lower animals, as determined by their affectors and receptors, is so
limited that, to the extent that organisms survive, such an Umwelt
constitutes a predictable universe; therefore, they possess no memories
but only fixed action patterns triggered by appropriate stimuli.
Memory only makes sense in a world of many possible futures, a world
not fully determined: otherwise we could be programmed to perform an
automatic and invariable set of behaviors, which would exactly fit our
adaptive needs. All futures share a common past: and thus memory
gives us a handle on any possible future.

It has been objected, however, that the universe is indeed
deterministic and predictable, but so complex that no animal can
exactly predict its behavior, and that the very complex nervous systems
of the higher animals developed precisely in order to improve their
predictive powers. Such an argument produces an interesting
dialectic, which might be worth following. It could be replied to
the objection that the nervous systems of human beings are many orders
of magnitude more complex than the physical universe they are, it is
claimed, designed to predict. There are billions of times more
possible brain-states in a single human brain than there are particles
in the physical cosmos: the relations of the brain's parts carry usable
information, whereas the relations between particles in the physical
universe do not.

There might, however, be a rejoinder to this argument, in turn.
Human brains are part of the universe, and they merely make the job of
predicting it more difficult without altering, by their presence, its
actual determinateness. The fact that a major function of human
brains is to predict the complex behaviors of each other, in no way
weakens the proposition that the world is predictable.

But even this argument can be countered. For it implicitly yields
the point that the world is in practice unpredictable, because any
mechanism complex enough to predict events outside itself would also be
so complex as to pose an insuperable problem to another
predicting-mechanism, unless that other mechanism were in turn more
complex still. It would not, moreover, be able to predict its own
behavior. If Apollo gives prophesies, we should perhaps believe
him, because he knows the mysteries of things and all human
thoughts. But if Zeus, who also knows what Apollo is thinking,
and who thus knows what Apollo will do, makes a contrary prophesy, we
should believe Zeus instead. But Zeus does not know what Zeus
will do, so perhaps we should not even believe Zeus after all.

Our original objector might still be able to argue that the
predictability of events is only theoretical, not practical. But
this argument must fail, too; for when we are dealing with the whole
universe, the practical is the theoretical: if something is practically
impossible for the whole universe, that is a way of saying it is
theoretically impossible.

Finally, our antagonist might fall back to the position that future
events are determined but not predictable. But since
predictability would be the only conceivable scientific test of
determinateness, such a statement would be semantically empty. A
system whose complexity is increasing faster than any theoretical
prediction-system could operate would therefore not be fully
determined. In such a universe free choice based on memory would
be a powerful survival strategy.

The peculiar logical form of this digression-which uses the infinite
regress as a way of proving a negative proposition by means of a
reductio ad absurdum- illustrates the peculiar predicament that the
human brain at once evolved to handle and at the same time helped to
create for itself. The very structure of the thinking process
itself reflects the increasing levels of complexity the brain was
called upon to deal with.

Human information processing is, therefore, (7) hierarchical in its
organization. In the columns of neurons in the sensory cortex a
plausible reconstruction of the world is created by a hierarchy of
cells, the ones at the base responding to very simple stimuli and
passing on their findings to cells programmed to respond to
successively more complex stimuli. Likewise, motor decisions are
passed down a long command-chain of simpler and simpler neural
servomechanisms.

The co-ordination of these hierarchical systems in which many kinds of
disparate information must be integrated, some requiring more
processing-time and some requiring less, requires a neural pulse within
which all relevant information is brought together as a whole.
For instance, in the visual system many levels of detail-frequency,
color, and depth must all be synchronized, or we would not be able to
associate the various features of a visual scene. Thus brain
processing is (8) essentially rhythmic. That these rhythms can be
"driven" or reinforced by repeated photic or auditory stimuli, to
produce peculiar subjective states, is already well known.

More controversial in detail, but in general widely accepted, is the
proposition that the brain's activities are (9) self-rewarding.
The brain possesses built-in sites for the reception of opioid peptides
such as enkephalin-the endorphins-and also other pleasure-associated
neurohumors such as the catecholamines. It also controls the
manufacture and release of these chemicals, and it has been shown that
behavior can be reinforced by their use as a reward. The brain,
therefore, is able to reward itself for certain activities which are,
presumably, preferred for their adaptive utility. Clearly if this
system of self-reward is the major motivating agent of the brain, any
external technique for calibrating and controlling it would result in
an enormously enhanced mental efficiency: we would, so to speak, be
able to harness all our intellectual and emotional resources to a given
task. (Indeed, we will argue later that this is exactly what an
esthetic education, including an early introduction to metered verse in
the form of nursery rhymes, can do.) It is, we believe, precisely this
autonomous and reflexive reward system which underlies the whole realm
of human values, ultimate purposes, and ideals such as truth, beauty,
and goodness.

Associated with the brain's capacity for self-reward is (10) that it is
characteristically reflexive. It is within broad limits
self-calibrating (partly because of the habituation response).
And it seems, unlike a computer, to have a more or less general
capacity to convert software into hardware-short-term memory into
long-term memory, for example-and vice-versa, to examine by
introspection its own operations, so that its hardware can become its
input or even its program. In the brain the observer problem
becomes most acute: in fact we might define consciousness itself as the
continuous irresolvable disparity between the brain as observer of
itself and the brain as the object of observation. The
coincidence between the words for consciousness and conscience in many
languages points, incidentally, to the relationship between
self-awareness and self-reward.

The human nervous system, we know now, cannot be separated from the
human cultural system it was designed to serve. Its operations
are (11) essentially social. It is not only specific skills and
communicative competences that are learnt in a social context, but also
the fundamental capacities of arousal, orientation, attention, and
motivation. Clearly we possess genetic proclivities to learn
speech, elementary mathematical calculation, and so on; but equally
clearly we require a socio-cultural context to release that
potential. On the other hand, human society itself can be
profoundly changed by the development of new ways of using the brain:
take, for instance, the enormous socio-cultural effects of the
invention of the written word. In a sense, reading is a sort of
new synthetic instinct, input which becomes a program and which in turn
crystallizes into neural hardware, and which incorporates a cultural
loop into the human nervous circuit. This "new instinct" in turn
profoundly changes the environment within which young human brains are
programmed. In the early stages of human evolution such new
instincts (speech must have been one) had to wait for their full
development while sexual selection established the necessary elaborate
vocal circuitry in the cortex. Later on we were able to use our
technology, which required much less time to develop, as a sort of
supplementary external nervous system. A book is a sort of R.O.M.
chip we can plug in to our heads.

One of the most exciting propositions of the new brain science is that
human information processing is (12) hemispherically specialized.
Here some important distinctions must be made. There are strong
logical objections to the popular and prevailing view that the right
brain is emotional while the left brain is rational, and that artistic
capacities, being emotional, are located in the right brain. Both
sides of the brain are capable of rational calculation: it is surely
just as rational to "see" a geometric proof-which is the function of
the right brain-as to analyze a logical proposition-which would be done
on the left. And both sides of the brain respond to the presence
of brain chemicals, and thus both must be said to be "emotional" in
this crude sense. The right brain may be better able to recognize
and report emotions, but this capacity is surely a cognitive one in
itself, and does not necessarily imply a judgment about whether it
feels emotions more or less than the left. Above all, art is
quite as much a rational activity as it is an emotional one: so the
location of art on the "emotional" right is surely the result of a
misunderstanding of the nature of art. More plausible is the
position of Jerre Levy, who characterizes the relationship between
right and left as a complementarity of cognitive capacities. She
has stated in a brilliant aphorism that the left brain maps spatial
information into a temporal order, while the right brain maps temporal
information onto a spatial order. In a sense understanding
largely consists in the translation of information to and fro between a
temporal ordering and a spatial one-resulting in a sort of stereoscopic
depth-cognition. In Levy's view, the two "brains" alternate in
the treatment of information, according to a rhythm determined by the
general brain state, and pass, each time, their accumulated findings on
to each other. The fact that experienced musicians use their left
brain just as much as their right in listening to music shows that
their higher understanding of music is the result of the collaboration
of both "brains," the music having been translated first from temporal
sequence to spatial pattern, and then "read," as it were, back into a
temporal movement. The neurobiologist Gunther Baumgartner
suggests that the forebrain acts as the integrating agent between
specialized left and right functions, and it is in this integrative
process that we would locate the essentially creative capacities of the
brain, whether artistic or scientific. The apparent superiority
of the isolated right brain in emotional matters may well reflect
simply the fact that emotions, like music, are temporal in nature and
their articulation requires the sort of temporal-on-spatial mapping
that is the specialty of the right.

Finally, human information-processing can be described as (13)
kalogenetic (Turner), a word coined from the Greek (KALOS), for beauty,
goodness, rightness; and (GENESIS), genesis: Begetting, productive
cause, origin, source. Another word for this characteristic,
coined in jest as an etymological chimera by Poppel, is
monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain
everything. William James called it "the will to believe."
Laughlin and d'Aquili use the term "the cognitive imperative," or the
"what is it?" syndrome, while Zollinger has identified it in the
scientific urge to confirm and affirm a given hypothesis, rather than
to deconfirm it (as Karl Popper would have us do). Baumgartner's
notion of the integrative function of the forebrain also partakes of
the same idea. The human nervous system has a strong drive to
construct affirmative, plausible, coherent, consistent, parsimonious,
and predictively powerful models of the world, in which all events are
explained by and take their place in a system which is at once rich in
implications beyond its existing data and at the same time governed by
as few principles or axioms as possible. The words that
scientists use for such a system are "elegant," "powerful," and ,
often, "beautiful"; artists and philosophers use the same terms and
also "appropriate," "fitting," "correct," "right," all of which can
translate the Greek (KALOS).

If this tendency is a true drive, then according to the theory of
reinforcement, it is an activity for which the brain rewards itself;
and if there were techniques by which the endogenous reward system
could be stimulated and sensitized, then those techniques would enable
us to greatly enhance the integrative powers of our minds.

Any candidate for identification as such a technique would have to meet
certain qualifications. First, it would probably be culturally
universal, since it would be based on neural and biochemical features
common to all human beings. Second, it would be very archaic,
identifiable as an element of the most ancient and the most primitive
cultures. Third, it would be likely to be regarded by its
indigenous practitioners as the locus of an almost magical inspiration
and as a source of wisdom; it would have the reputation of having
significantly contributed to the efficiency and adaptiveness of the
societies in which it is practiced. Fourth, it would be
associated with those social and cultural activities which demand the
highest powers of original thought and complex calculation, such as
education, the organization of large-scale projects like war and
co-operative agriculture, and the rituals which digest for social uses
the dangerous and valuable energies implicit in sexuality, birth,
death, sickness, and the like.

Metered poetry, the use of rule-governed rhythmic measures in the
production of a heightened and intensified form of linguistic
expression, nicely fulfills these requirements. Jerome
Rothenberg's collection of ancient and "primitive" poetry, Technicians
of the Sacred, contains poems or excerpts from poems from about eighty
different cultures, past and present, in Africa, North and South
America, Asia, and Oceania; W. K. Wimsatt's excellent collection of
essays, Versification: Major Language Types, describes the metrical
features of Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Slavic, Uralic,
Germanic, Celtic, Italian, Spanish, French, Old English and Modern
English, and apologies (p. 17) for omitting the Vedic-Indic verse
system, the Arabic, including Swahili, and the Persian. Metered
poetry is a highly complex activity which is culturally
universal. One of us (Turner) has heard poetry recited by Ndembu
spirit-doctors in Zambia and has, with the anthropologist Wulf
Schiefenhovel, translated Eipo poetry from Central New Guinea. He
reports, as a poet, that the meter of Eipo poetry, when reproduced in
English, has much the same emotional effect as it does in the
original. Such a minute correspondence between poets in such
widely different cultures surely points to an identical
neurophysiological mechanism.

In nearly all cultures, metered poetry is used in the crucial religious
and social (and often economic) rituals, and has the reputation of
containing mysterious wisdom; the learning of major poetic texts is
central to the process of education in nearly all literate
traditions. Much work-farming, herding, hunting, war,
ship-handling, even mining-has its own body of poetry and song.

It may be objected, however, that we have simply lumped together many
different uses of language under an artificial category of
poetry. This objection is strongly negated by the fact that poets
themselves, who ought to know, can recognize the work of their alien
colleagues as poetry, despite cultural differences. But we do not
have to rely only on the reports of qualified native informants.
Objective and universal and specific traits can be identified across
the whole range of poetic practice throughout the world and as far back
into the past as we have records. From these universal
characteristics we can construct a general definition of metered poetry
which will hold good from the ancient Greeks to the Kwakiutl, and from
Racine to Polynesia.

The fundamental unit of metered poetry is what we shall call the
LINE. We distinguish it by capitalization from the normal use of
the word, because some orthographic traditions do not conventionally
write or print the LINE in a separate space as we do; and in other
traditions there are examples of a long line divided by a caesura into
two sections, which would, in terms of our classification, actually
constitute a couplet of LINES. There are also examples of what we
would call a single LINE divided in half on the page. The LINE is
preceded and followed by a distinct pause (not necessarily a pause for
breath), which, despite the presence of other pauses within the line,
divides the verse into clearly identifiable pieces. Turner, for
example, can readily recognize the LINE-divisions of poetry in
languages he does not know, when it is read aloud. The LINE unit
can contain from four to twenty syllables; but it usually contains
between seven and seventeen in languages which do not use fixed lexical
tones, or between four and eight syllables in tonal languages, like
Chinese, in which the metrical syllable takes about twice as long to
articulate. Most remarkable of all, this fundamental unit nearly
always takes from two to four seconds to recite, with a strong peak in
distribution between 2.5 and 3.5 seconds. A caesura will usually
divide the LINES in the longer part of the range; sometimes (as with
Greek and Latin epic dactylic hexameters), the unit will be four to six
seconds long, but clearly divided by a caesura and constituting for our
purposes two LINES.

Turner has recorded and measured Latin, Greek, English, Chinese,
Japanese, and French poetry, and Poppel has done so for German.
Less systematic measurements, by syllable-count, have revealed fully
consistent results for Ndembu(Zambia), Eipo (New Guinea), Spanish,
Italian, Hungarian, Uralic, Slavic, and Celtic. An average
syllable in a non-tonal language takes about 1/4 second to articulate,
and in a tonal language about 1/2 second, though recitation traditions
vary in this respect. The Ndembu LINE averages ten syllables;
Eipo poetry favors an eight- or twelve-syllable line; in Spanish the
epic line of the Poema de Mio Cid is about fourteen syllables, but most
other poetry is octosyllabic or hendecasyllabic (eight or eleven); the
classic Italian line is the eleven-syllable endecasillabo; Hungarian
uses lines between six and twelve syllables long, with a preference for
eights and twelves; Slavic has octosyllabics and decasyllabics, with an
epic long line of fifteen to sixteen syllables; Celtic has sevens,
eights, nines, and some longer-lined meters.12 Among the traditions we
have measured more closely, the results are as follows, giving a range
of different meters:

This fundamental unit is nearly always a rhythmic, semantic, and
syntactical unit, as well: a sentence, a colon, a clause, or a phrase;
or a completed group of them. Thus other linguistic rhythms are
entrained to the basic acoustic rhythm, producing that pleasing
sensation of "fit" and inevitability which is part of the delight of
verse, and is so helpful to the memory. Generally a short line is
used to deal with light subjects, while the long line is reserved for
epic or tragic matters.

It is, we believe, highly significant that this analysis of the
fundamental LINE in human verse gives little or no significance to
breath, or "breath-units," as a determinant of the divisions of human
meter. Thus our commonsense observation that breath in speech is
largely under voluntary control, and that one could speak anything from
one syllable to about forty in one breath, is vindicated. Systems
of verse based on breath-units, such as "projective verse" and many
other free-verse systems, therefore have no objective validity or
physiological foundation.15

The second universal characteristic of human verse meter is that
certain marked elements of the LINE or of groups of LINES remain
constant throughout the poem, and thus serve as indicators of the
repetition of a pattern. The 3-second cycle is not merely marked
by a pause, but by distinct resemblances between the material in each
cycle. Repetition is added to frequency to emphasize the rhythm.

These constant elements can take many forms. Simplest of all is a
constant number of syllables per line, as in Hungarian folk poetry; but
here the strict grammatical integrity of each line is insisted upon, as
if to compensate for the absence of other markers. Some verse
forms (for instance, that of the Poema de Mio Cid) have a fixed number
of stressed syllables per line, with an unfixed number of unstressed
syllables. Other meters (most European ones, for example) use
small patterns of syllables, distinguished by stress or length, to make
feet, creating a line out of a fixed number of feet. Tonal
languages, like Chinese, distinguish between syllables of an unchanging
tone and syllables which change tone, and construct meters out of
repeated patterns of changing and unchanging syllables. Celtic
poetry uses prescribed cadences; Old English uses systematic
alliteration. Many languages use some system of assonance,
especially rhyme, which usually marks very strongly the ending of a
line, and thus forms a strong contrast-spike to divide off one line
from the next. Hebrew poetry uses semantic and syntactical
parallels between its pairs of half-lines. Often many of these
devices will be used at once, some prescribed by the conventions of the
poetic form, others left to the discretion and inspiration of the
poet. No verse-convention prescribes all the characteristics of a
line, so every poem contains an interplay between prescribed elements
and free variation.16

Sometimes, as in the Spenserian stanza, or in the Greek or English ode,
or in the invented stanzas of Donne or Yeats, a whole group of lines of
different lengths will itself constitute a repeated element. When
lines of different lengths are used together, as in Milton's Lycidas,
the rhyme (which stresses the integrity of the line) and the foot are
given especial emphasis to compensate for the variation in the
fundamental pulse-as if to insist on the threshold dividing the
carrier-wave from mere "noise." And in variable-lined verses there is
usually a normal-length line which acts as an unconscious constant
against which the exceptions are measured as such.

At this point, it should be indicated that some of the characteristics
of metered poetry do not apply to songs and lyrics derived from a song
tradition. Music has its own form of organization. Which
diminishes the importance of the line at the expense of the musical
phrase. But in those traditions where we can see poetry emerging
from song, such as the Latin lyric, there is an interesting tendency,
as the musical order is forgotten, toward the establishment of the
characteristically poetic forms of organization: the regular line, with
variations, the distinction between different types of syllable (long
and short, stressed and unstressed, totally changing or unchanging),
and the rest. Thus the fact that songs do not conform to the
limits of poetic meter is negative proof of the relation of language
and meter.

The third universal characteristic of human metrical verse is
variation, or, more precisely, a pseudolinguistic generativeness
created by the imposition of rules, which makes possible significant
perturbations of an expressive medium. Robert Frost put it very
well, in a negative way, when he described poetry without meter as
being like tennis without a net: the net introduces a restriction which
is paradoxically fertile in the elaboration of groundstrokes which it
demands, and significant in that it distinguishes legal from illegal
shots.

Variation does not necessarily mean departure from the rules (Romantic
and Modernist theories of art sometimes make this mistake).
Variation does not occur despite the rules but because of them.
Freedom never means a freedom from rules, but the freedom of
rules. It is important here for us to distinguish our general
position from that of sociobiological and other purists of the
genetic-deterministic persuasion on one hand, and from the pure
cultural relativists, behaviorists or otherwise, on the other.
Genetic determinists would be likely to assume, once a human universal
such as metrical verse is pointed out to them, that this behavior
indicates the presence of a set of biological constraints which act as
an outer envelope, restricting possible human behaviors within a given
repertoire, large or small. Cultural relativists would tend to
deny the existence of such a human universal, or would be inclined to
dismiss it as an analogous response to similar problems or stimuli, or
as an artificial product of the investigator's definitional vocabulary
and research method.

We would adopt a third position, which is already hinted by our use of
the word "pseudolinguistic." For us, the similarities between metered
verse in different cultures are real and do indeed indicate a shared
biological underpinning; but unlike the genetic determinists we do not
regard this shared inheritance as a constraint, nor as an outer
envelope restricting human behavior to a certain range. Rather,
we would regard it as a set of rules which, though derived from the
structure of the human auditory cortex and the brain in general, does
not restrict, but enormously increases, the range of possible human
behavior.

At first glance, this position might appear paradoxical. How can
the range of possibilities be increased by the imposition of rules
governing their use? If rules are rules, then they must surely deny
certain previously possible behaviors, and therefore decrease the total
number of them.

The paradox is easily resolved. A mathematical analogy will
help. Given four possible behaviors, A, B, C, and D, only four
alternatives exist. If we now impose a rule, which is that these
behaviors can only be performed two at a time, suddenly and strangely
there are now not four but six alternatives: AB, BC, CD, AC, BD,
AD. Of course, this is cheating, in a sense, because before we
mentioned the rule we never hinted that behaviors might come in
groups. It could be pointed out that if we are talking about sets
of behaviors, in fact sixteen possibilities exist: the ten already
mentioned, the four groups of three, the whole group together, and the
null set. But this is precisely what the rule has done: it has
created the group of behaviors as a significant entity, as a behavior
in itself, and therefore expanded the repertoire from four to
six. Furthermore, those six permitted combinations now stand in
relation to ten non-permitted ones, and their correctness marks them
out as valuable and special, as opposed to the "incorrect"
permutations. Thus the rule has introduced a) a greater
repertoire of behaviors than was previously possible and b) a marker of
significance and value. All game-rules work in this way, creating
possible scenarios and desired goals out of thin air.

The linguistic rules of phonology, grammar, and the lexicon work in a
generally similar way. Linguistic rules are, to an extent,
arbitrary and culture-bound: but Chomsky has shown certain invariant
characteristics in the way in which human languages use syntactical
subordination, which are no doubt biological in origin (and probably
related to the hierarchical nature of human brain processes).
Meter, with its cultural variations in the syllabic markers but its
invariance in LINE-length, shows a similar interplay of cultural and
genetic forces, and, more important, it produces a similar increase in
the repertoire of behavior and a similar capacity to create
significance.

In fact it is this general strategy by which the DNA molecule of life
and the nervous systems of the higher animals attained greater
complexities than the physical universe out of which they evolved: by
making permutations of elements significant through highly restrictive
"rules," and therefore increasing, as it were, the "cardinality" of the
number of bits of information that the organism could hold. We
find, for example, a similar interplay between genetic and cultural
factors in the human recognition of colors: a rather restricted set of
anatomically-determined color sensitivities is combined by culture into
a large, and often idiosyncratic, repertoire of tints and shades, many
of them with strong ideological significance. The range, variety,
and combinations of colored pigmentation used in animal ritual behavior
attests to a corresponding extension and valorization of color
distinctions among the higher animals.

Thus metrical variation can be seen as a code, or communicative device,
and the various elements of meter can be neatly described in terms of
information theory. The three-second LINE is the communicative
medium or "carrier-wave," which must be distinguishable from mere
"noise" or the random transmissions around it, by the recurrence of a
pause at the LINE-ending, by the many regular metrical
features-syllable-count, stress, quantity, tone, systematic assonance,
etc.-that we have described, and by the coincidence of semantic,
syntactic, and rhythmic units with the LINE unit. Metrical
variation is the "message" which is transmitted upon the communicative
medium-like a radio-transmission, it consists of a systematic
distortion of a regular medium or wave, which nevertheless remains
within the regular parameters of the medium so that at all times the
transmission is distinguishable from random noise.

The "message" that metrical variation conveys, however, is rather
mysterious. If it is a code, what kind of code is it? Metrical
scholars have attempted to discover exact relationships between
individual metrical variations and the semantic content of poetry.17
But their conclusions have been disappointingly vague or arbitrary,
reminiscent, in fact, of musicological attempts to assign fixed
meanings to different musical keys, signatures, and variations, so as
to make a symphony describe a scene or conduct an argument. Here
the analogy between metrical and linguistic significance breaks
down. certainly a connection between metrical (or musical) and
linguistic meaning exists, and in some cultural traditions (English
Augustan poetry and European Romantic music, for instance) artists have
developed a self-conscious repertoire of metrical or musical codes to
convey specific meanings. But other traditions do not possess
such codifications, or else use the same specific devices to convey
entirely different ideas.

The predicament of the critic, in fact, can be likened to that of a
viewer of a visual artifact who is so convinced that what he is looking
at is a page of writing that he does not realize that the artifact is
actually a picture. Perhaps it is a picture of something he had
never seen (or never noticed), and thus his mistake is a natural
one. But the attempt to extract a sort of linguistic meaning out
of the planes, lines, corners, masses, and angles of a picture would be
frustratingly arbitrary-especially if he had a whole series of
paintings of different subjects, in which the same visual elements were
used for entirely different purposes; the same curve for a face, a
hillside, and the sail of a ship. Linguistic meaning and pictorial
meaning are based on codes so fundamentally different that no
code-cracking algorithm that would work on one could possibly work on
the other. Their mutual intelligibility cannot be sought in the
direction of analysis, but only within the context of a synthetic whole
which contains both of them.

What we are suggesting is that a linguistic type of analysis of meter,
as of music (or painting, e.g., Chinese landscape painting), is likely
to be fruitful only when the composer has arbitrarily imposed
linguistic meaning on the elements of his composition; and that the
meaning of metrical variation must be sought in a fashion much more
like that of the recognition of a tune or the subject of a picture.

That is, metrical variations are not significant in themselves, like
sememes: but rather they form, together, a picture-like Gestalt which
is a distinct representation of something that we can recognize; and
thus, like pictorial representations, or music, they are much less
culture-bound than linguistic codes. But here, excitingly, we
encounter a paradox stemming from the gross structure of the human
brain. Poetry, being an art of language, is presumably processed
by the left temporal lobe of the brain. But meter, we are
suggesting, carries meaning in a fashion much more like that of a
picture of a melody, in which the meaning inheres more in the whole
than in the parts. There is no "lexicon" of metrical forms: they
are not signs but elements of an analogical structure. And this
kind of understanding is known to take place on the right side of the
brain. If this hypothesis is accurate, meter is, in part, a way
of introducing right-brain processes into the left-brain activity of
understanding language; and in another sense, it is a way of connecting
our much more culture-bound (and perhaps evolutionarily later)
linguistic capacities with the relatively more "hardwired" spatial
pattern-recognition faculties we share with the higher mammals.

It is in the context of this hypothesis that we wish to introduce the
major finding of this essay, which explains, we believe, the
extra-ordinary prevalence of the 3-second LINE in human poetry.

If we ask the question "what does the ear hear?" the obvious answer is
"sound." What is sound? Mechanical waves in the air or other
medium. But this answer is not very illuminating. We can,
for instance, perceive mechanical waves by the sense of touch: it would
be as inaccurate to say that a deaf man "heard" a vibrating handrail
with his fingers, as it would be to say a blind man "saw" a fire with
the skin of his face. What characterizes hearing as such is not
that it senses mechanical waves but that it senses the distinctions
between mechanical waves; just as what characterizes sight is not the
perception of electromagnetic waves but the perception of distinctions
between electromagnetic waves.

For the sense of sight those distinctions (except for color) are
spatial ones; but for the sense of hearing they are mainly
temporal. To put it directly: what the sense of hearing hears is
essentially time. The recognition of differences of pitch
involves a very pure (and highly accurate) comparative measurement of
different frequencies into which time is divided. The perception
of timbre, tone, sound texture, and so on consists in the recognition
of combinations of frequencies: and the sense of rhythm and tempo
carries the recognition of frequency into the realm of longer periods
of time.

The sense of hearing is not only a marvelously accurate instrument for
detecting differences between temporal periods; it is also an active
organizer, arranging those different periods within a hierarchy as
definite as that of the seconds, minutes, and hours of a clock, but one
in which the different periodicities are also uniquely valorized.
In the realm of pitch the structure of that hierarchy is embodied in
the laws of harmony, and is well known (though it has not often been
recognized that "sound" and "time" are virtually the same thing).
New discoveries by Ernst Poppel's group in Munich have begun to open up
the role of the auditory time-hierarchy in the structure and function
of the brain. Out of this investigation is coming a comprehensive
understanding of the general scheduling-organization of the human
sensory-motor system, and a fresh approach to the production and
understanding of language. We shall first briefly outline the
auditory hierarchy.

Events separated by periods of time shorter than about three
thousandths of a second are classified by the hearing system as
simultaneous. If a brief sound of one pitch is played to one ear,
and another of a different pitch is played to the other less than .003
sec. later, the subject will experience only one sound. If the
sounds are a little more than .003 sec. apart, the subject will
experience two sounds. However, he will not be able to tell which
of the two sounds came first, nor will he until the gap between them is
increased ten times. Thus the lowest category in the hierarchy of
auditory time is simultaneity, and the second lowest is mere temporal
separation, without a preferred order of time. The most primary
temporal experience is timeless unity; next comes a spacelike
recognition of difference-spacelike because, unlike temporal positions,
spatial positions can be exchanged. One can go from New York to
Berlin or from Berlin to New York; but one can only go from 1980 to
1983, not from 1983 to 1980. Likewise, the realm of "separation"
is a non-deterministic, acausal one: events happen in it, perhaps in
patterns or perhaps not, but they cannot be said to cause one another,
because we cannot say which came first.

When two sounds are about three hundredths of a second apart, a subject
can experience their sequence, accurately reporting which came
first. This is the third category in the hierarchy of auditory
time, subsuming separations and simultaneities and organizing them
rationally with respect to each other. But at this stage the
organism is still a passive recipient of stimuli; we can hear a
sequence of two sounds one-tenth of a second apart, but there is
nothing we can do in response to the first sound before the second
sound comes along: we are helpless to alter what will befall us, if the
interval between the alert and its sequel falls within this
range. Unlike the world of temporal separation, which is in a
sense a realm of chance and pattern, the world of sequence is a realm
of fate and cause. Events follow each other, and their temporal
connections can be recognized as necessary, if indeed they are; but
there is nothing we can do about it.

Once the temporal interval is above about three-tenths of a second,
however, we have entered a new temporal category, which we might call
response. For three-tenths of a second (.3 sec.) is enough time
for a human subject to react to an acoustic stimulus. If we play
two sounds to our subject a second apart, the subject could in theory
prepare to deal with the second sound in the time given him after
hearing the first. The perceiver is no longer passive, and events
can be treated by him as actions in response to which he can perform
actions of his own and which he can modify before they happen if he
understands their cause. For response to exist there must be
simultaneities, a separation, and a further element which might be
characterized as function or, in a primitive sense, purpose. The
response to a given stimulus will differ according to the function of
the responding organ and the purpose of the organism as a whole.

At several places in this analysis it has been pointed out that a given
familiar temporal relation-chance, pattern, fate, cause, action,
function, purpose-only becomes possible when there is enough time for
it to exist in. The idea that an entity needs time to exist in
has become commonplace recently: an electron, for instance, requires at
least 10-20 seconds of time (its spin period) to exist in, just as
surely as it requires 10-10 centimeters of space (its Compton
wavelength). The corollary to this observation is that entities
which consist only in spatio-temporal relations are not necessarily
less real for that than material objects, for spatio-temporal relations
are exactly what material objects consist of too. But though a
given period of time may be sufficient for an example of given
relation-chance, cause, function-to be recognized in, it is not enough
for the concept of the relation to be formulated in. It takes
much less time to recognize or speak a word once learned than it takes
to learn the word in the first place. Many examples of the
sequence or response relation between events must be compared before a
causal or purposive order can be formulated and thus recognized in
individual cases. But comparisons requires discrete parcels of
experience between which the comparison may be made, and since the
entities being compared are themselves temporal in nature, these
parcels of experience must consist in equal periods of time. In
like fashion, the analysis of a picture (for transmission,
reproduction, or identification of its details) might begin by dividing
the picture up into "pixels" by means of a series of grids of various
frequency; the highest-frequency grid representing the limit of the
eye's activity, the lower ones increasingly concerned with complex
relations between details. The next lowest time-division beyond
the .3 second response-frequency must be sufficiently long to avoid
falling into the range of the characteristic time-quanta required for
the completion and recognition of the temporal relations to be
compared. The comparison of experience takes more time than
experience itself; the recognition of a melody takes more time than the
hearing of the single notes.

This fundamental "parcel of experience" turns out to be about three
seconds. The three-second period, roughly speaking, is the length
of the human present moment. (At least it is for the auditory
system, which possesses the sharpest temporal acuity of all the
senses. The eye, for instance, is twice as slow as the ear in
distinguishing temporal separation from simultaneity.) The
philosophical notion of the "specious present" finds here its
experimental embodiment.

A human speaker will pause for a few milliseconds every three seconds
or so, and in that period decide on the precise syntax and lexicon of
the next three seconds. A listener will absorb about three
seconds of heard speech without pause or reflection, then stop
listening briefly in order to integrate and make sense of what he has
heard. (Speaker and hearer, however, are not necessarily "in
phase" for this activity; this observation will be seen to be of
importance later.)

To use a cybernetic metaphor, we possess an auditory information
"buffer" whose capacity is three seconds' worth of information; at the
end of three seconds the "buffer" is full, and it passes on its entire
accumulated stock of information to the higher processing
centers. In theory this stock could consist of about 1,000
simultaneities, 100 discrete temporal separations, and ten consecutive
responses to stimuli. In practice the "buffer" has rather smaller
capacity than this (about 60 separations); it seems to need a certain
amount of "down-time."

It appears likely that another mechanism is involved here, too.
Different types of information take different amounts of time to be
processed by the cortex. For instance, fine detail in the visual
field takes more time to be identified by the cortex than coarse
detail. (Indeed, the time taken to process detail seems to be
used by the brain as a tag to label its visual frequency.)18 Some sort
of pulse is necessary so that all the information of different kinds
will arrive at the higher processing centers as a bundle, correctly
labeled as belonging together, and at the same time; the sensory cortex
"waits" for the "slowest" information to catch up with the "fastest" so
that it can all be sent off at once. And this 3-second period
constitutes a "pulse."

Beyond the two horizons of this present moment exist the two periods
which together constitute duration, which is the highest or
"longest-frequency" integrative level of the human perception of
time. Those two periods, the past and the future, memory and
planning, are the widest arena of human thought (unless the religious
or metaphysical category of "eternity" constitutes an even wider
one). It is within the realm of duration, that what we call
freedom can exist, for it is within that realm that purposes and
functions, the governors of response, can themselves be compared and
selected. The differences between past and future, and the
differences between possible futures, constitute the field of value,
and the relations between low-frequency objects and the more primitive
high-frequency objects of which they are composed constitute the field
of quality.

It is tempting to relate this foregoing hierarchical taxonomy of
temporal periodicities to the structure and evolution of the physical
universe itself. The temporal category of simultaneity nicely
corresponds to the atemporal Umwelt of the photon, which reigned
supreme in the first microsecond of the Big Bang. The category of
separation resembles the weak, acausal, stochastic, spacelike
temporality of quantum physics, within which there is no preferred
direction of time: a condition which must have prevailed shortly after
the origin of the universe, and of which the quantum-mechanical
organization of subatomic particles is a living fossil. The
category of sequence matches the causal, deterministic, and entropic
realm of classical hard science, whose subject came into being some
time after the origin of the universe, once the primal explosion had
cooled sufficiently to permit the existence if organized, discrete, and
enduring matter. With the category of response we are clearly
within the Umwelt of living matter, with its functions, purposes, and
even its primitive and temporary teleology, which began about ten
billion years after the Big Bang. Once we cross the horizon of
the present we leave the world of animals and enter the realm of
duration, which first came into being perhaps a million years ago (if
it was roughly coeval with speech and with that development of the left
brain which gave us the tenses of language). The evolution and
hierarchical structure of the human hearing mechanism thus could be
said to recapitulate the history and organization of the cosmos.
The history of science has been the retracing of that path backwards by
means of clocks of greater and greater acuity.

Cosmological speculation aside, it should already be obvious that a
remarkable and suggestive correlation exists between the temporal
organization of poetic meter and the temporal function of the human
hearing mechanism. Of general linguistic significance is the fact
that the length of a syllable-about 1/3 second-corresponds to the
minimum period within which a response to an auditory stimulus can take
place: this is commonsense, really, as speech must, to be efficient, be
as fast as it can be, while, to be controllable, it must be slow enough
for a speaker or hearer to react to a syllable before the next one
comes along.

Of more specific significance for our subject is the very exact
correlation between the three-second LINE and the three-second
"auditory present." The average number of syllables per LINE in human
poetry seems to be about ten; so human poetic meter embodies the two
lowest-frequency rhythms in the human auditory system.

The independence of poetic meter from the mechanism of breathing, which
we have already noted, is thus explained by the fact that the
master-rhythm of human meter is not pulmonary but neural: we must seek
the origins of poetry not among the lower regions of the human
organism, but among the higher. The frequent practice in reading
"free verse" aloud, of breathing at the end of the line-even when the
line is highly variable in length and often broken quite without regard
to syntax-is therefore not only grammatically confusing but deeply
unnatural: for it forces a pause where neural processing would not
normally put it.

But at least there was a clear, if erroneous, rationale for the
doctrine of meter as made up of "breath-units." Without this rationale,
how do we explain the cultural universality of meter? Why does verse
embody the three-second neural "present"? What functions could be
served by this artificial and external mimicry of an endogenous brain
rhythm? Given the fact, already stated, that poetry fulfills many of
the superficial conditions demanded of a brain-efficiency reward
control system, how might the three-second rhythm serve that function?
And what is the role of the other components of meter-the rhythmic
parallelism between the LINES, and the information-bearing variations
upon that parallelism?

One further batch of data will help guide our hypothesizing: the
subjective reports of poets and readers of poetry about the effects and
powers of poetic meter. Although these reports would be
inadequate and ambiguous as the sole support of an argument, they may
point us in the right direction and confirm conclusions arrived at by
other means.

A brief and incomplete summary of these reports, with a few citations,
should suggest to a reader educated in literature the scope of their
general agreement. Robert Graves speaks of the shiver and the
coldness in the spine, the hair rising on the head and body, as does
Emily Dickinson. A profound muscular relaxation yet an intense
alertness and concentration is also recorded. The heart feels
squeezed and the stomach cramped. There is a tendency toward
laughter or tears, or both; the taking of deep breaths; and a slightly
intoxicated feeling (Samuel Taylor Coleridge compared it to the effects
of a moderate amount of strong spirits upon a conversation). At
the same time there is a cataract or avalanche of vigorous thought, in
which new connections are made; Shakespeare's Prospero describes the
sensation as a "beating mind" (the phrase is repeated three times in
different places in the play). There is a sense of being on the
edge of a precipice of insight-almost a vertigo-and the awareness of
entirely new combinations of ideas taking concrete shape, together with
feelings of strangeness and even terror. Some writers (Arnold,
for instance) speak of an inner light or flame. Outside stimuli
are often blanked out, so strong is the concentration. The
imagery of the poem becomes so intense that it is almost like real
sensory experience. Personal memories pleasant and unpleasant
(and sometimes previously inaccessible) are strongly evoked; there is
often an emotional re-experience of close personal ties, with family,
friends, lovers, the dead. There is an intense valorization of
the world and of human life, together with a strong sense of the
reconciliation of opposites-joy and sorrow, life and death, good and
evil, divine and human, reality and illusion, whole and part, comic and
tragic, time and timelessness. the sensation is not a timeless
one as such, but an experience of time so full of significance that
stillness and sweeping motion are the same thing. There is a
sense of power combined with effortlessness. The poet or reader
rises above the world, as it were, on the "viewless wings of poetry,"
and sees it all in its fullness and completeness, but without loss of
the quiddity and clarity of its details. There is an awareness of
one's own physical nature, of one's birth and death, and of a curious
transcendence of them; and, often, a strong feeling of universal and
particular love, and communal solidarity.

Of course, not all these subjective sensations necessarily occur
together in the experience of poetry, nor do they usually take their
most intense form; but a poet or frequent reader of poetry will
probably recognize most of them.

To this list, moreover, should be added a further property of metered
poetry, which goes beyond the immediate experience of it: that is, its
memorability. Part of this property is undoubtedly a merely
technical convenience: the knowledge of the number of syllables in a
line and the rhyme, for instance, limits the number of words and
phrases which are possible in a forgotten line and helps us to
logically reconstruct it. But introspection will reveal a deeper
quality to this memorability: somehow the rhythm of the words is
remembered even when the words themselves are lost to us; but the
rhythm helps us to recover the mental state in which we first heard or
read the poem, and then the gates of memory are opened and the words
come to us at once.

Equipped with the general contemporary conception of brain-processing
with which this essay began, with the temporal analysis of meter and
its correlation to the hearing-system, and with the subjective reports
of participants in the art, we may now begin to construct a plausible
hypothesis of what goes on in the brain during the experience of poetry.

Here we can draw upon a relatively new and speculative field of
scientific inquiry, which has been variously termed "neurophysiology,"
"biocybernetics," and "biopsychology," and is associated with the names
of such researchers as E. Bourguignon, E. D. Chapple, E. Gellhorn, A.
Neher, and R. Ornstein. Barbara Lex's essay "The Neurobiology of
Ritual Trance,"19 in which she summarizes and synthesizes much of their
work, provides many of the materials by which we may build an
explanatory bridge between the observed characteristics of human verse
and the new findings of the Munich group about the hearing
mechanism. Although Lex is concerned with the whole spectrum of
methods by which altered states of consciousness may be
attained-alcohol, hypnotic suggestion, breathing techniques, smoking
music, dancing, drugs, fasting, meditation, sensory deprivation, photic
driving, and auditory driving-and her focus is on ritual rather than
the art of poetry, her general argument fits in well with our own
findings.

Essentially her position is that the various techniques listed above,
and generalized as "driving behaviors," are designed to add the linear,
analytic, and verbal resources of the left brain the more intuitive and
holistic understanding of the right brain; to tune the central nervous
system and alleviate accumulated stress; and to invoke to the aid of
social solidarity and cultural values the powerful somatic and
emotional forces mediated by the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems, and the ergotropic and trophotropic responses they
control.20

It has been known for many years that rhythmic photic and auditory
stimulation can evoke epileptic symptoms in seizure-prone individuals,
and can produce powerful involuntary reactions even in normal
persons. The rhythmic stimulus entrains and then amplifies
natural brain rhythms, especially if it is tuned to an important
frequency such as the ten cycle-per-second alpha wave. It seems
plausible to us that the three-second poetic LINE is similarly tuned to
the three-second cycle of the auditory (and subjective-temporal)
present. The metrical and assonantal devices of verse such as
rhyme and stress, which create similarities between the LINES,
emphasize the repetition. The curious subjective effects of
metered verse-relaxation, a holistic sense of the world and so on-are
no doubt attributable to a very mild pseudotrance state induced by the
auditory driving effect of this repetition.

Auditory driving is known to affect the right brain much more
powerfully than the left: thus, where ordinary unmetered prose comes to
us in a "mono" mode, so to speak, affecting the left brain
predominantly, metered language comes to us in a "stereo" mode,
simultaneously calling on the verbal resources of the left and the
rhythmic potentials of the right.21

Of course, the matter is not as simple as this, even at this level of
discussion. The accurate scansion of poetry involves a complex
analysis of grammatical and lexical stress, which must be continually
integrated with a non-verbal right-brain understanding of metrical
stress. The delightful way in which the rhythm of the sentence,
as a semantic unit, counterpoints the rhythm of the meter in poetry, is
thus explained as the result of a co-operation between left and right
brain functions. The "stereo" effect of verse is not merely one
of simultaneous stimulation of two different brain areas, but also the
result of a necessary integrative collaboration and feedback between
them. The linguistic capacities of the left brain, which, as Levy
says, provide a temporal order for spatial information, are forced into
a conversation with the rhythmic and musical capacities of the right,
which provide a spatial order for temporal information.

But the driving rhythm of the three-second LINE is not just any
rhythm. It is, as we have seen, tuned to the largest limited unit
of auditory time, its specious present, within which causal sequences
can be compared, and free decisions taken. A complete poem-which
can be any length-is a duration, a realm of values, systematically
divided into presents, which are the realm of action. It
therefore summarizes our most sophisticated and most uniquely human
integrations of time.

There is, perhaps, still another effect at work on the cortical
level. The various divinatory practices of humankind (another
cultural universal, perhaps) all involve a common element: a process of
very complex calculation which seems quite irrelevant to the kind of
information sought by the diviner. A reader of the Tarot will
analyze elaborate combinations of cards, an I Ching reader will arrive
at his hexagram through a difficult process of mathematical figuring, a
reader of the horoscope will resort to remarkable computations of
astronomical position and time. (The common use of the word
"reader" in these contexts is suggestive.) The work of scanning metered
verse, especially when combined with the activity of recognizing
allusions and symbolisms, and the combination of them into the correct
patterns, seems analogous to these divinatory practices. The
function of this demanding process of calculation may be to occupy the
linear and rational faculties of the brain with a task which entirely
distracts them from the matter to be decided-a diagnosis, a marriage,
the future of an individual. Once the "loud voice" of the
reductive logical intelligence is thus stilled by distance, the quieter
whispering of a holistic intuition, which can integrate much larger
quantities of much poorer-quality information in more multifarious
ways-though with a probability of accuracy which is correspondingly
much lower-can then be heard. The technique is something like
that of the experienced stargazer, who can sometimes make out a very
faint star by focusing a little to one side of it, thereby bringing to
bear on it an area of the retina which, though inferior in acuity, is
more sensitive to light. The vatic, prophetic, or divinatory
powers traditionally attributes to poetry may be partly explained by
the use of this technique. If the analogy is slightly
unflattering to the work of some professional analytic critics of
poetry-reducing their work, as it does, to the status of an elaborate
decoy for the more literalistic proclivities of the brain-there is the
compensation that it is after all a very necessary activity, indeed
indispensable precisely because of its irrelevance.

On the cortical level, then, poetic meter serves a number of functions
generally aimed at tuning up and enhancing the performance of the
brain, by bringing to bear other faculties than the linguistic, which
we can relate to the summary of healthy brain characteristics at the
beginning of this paper. By ruling out certain rhythmic
possibilities, meter satisfies the brain's procrustean demand for
unambiguity and clear distinctions. By combining elements of
repetition and isochrony on one hand with variation on the other, it
nicely fulfills the brain's habituative need for controlled
novelty. By giving the brain a system of rhythmic organization as
well as a circumscribed set of semantic and syntactical possibilities,
it encourages the brain in its synthetic and predictive activity of
hypothesis-construction, and raises expectations which are pleasingly
satisfied at once. In its content, poetry has often had a
strongly prophetic character, an obvious indication of its predictive
function; and the mythic elements of poetry afford more subtle models
of the future by providing guides to conduct. Poetry presents to
the brain a system which is temporally and rhythmically hierarchical,
as well as linguistically so, and therefore matched to the hierarchical
organization of the brain itself. It does much of the work that
the brain must usually do for itself, in organizing information into
rhythmic pulses, integrating different types of information-rhythmic,
grammatical, lexical, acoustic-into easily assimilable parcels and
labeling their contents as belonging together. Like intravenous
nourishment, the information enters our system instantly, without a
lengthy process of digestion. The pleasure of metered verse
evidently comes from its ability to stimulate the brain's capacities of
self-reward, and the traditional concern of verse with the deepest
human values-truth, goodness, and beauty-is clearly associated with its
involvement with the brain's own motivational system. Poetry
seems to be a device the brain can use in reflexively calibrating
itself, turning its software into hardware and its hardware into
software: and accordingly poetry is traditionally concerned, on its
semantic level, with consciousness and conscience. As a
quintessentially cultural activity, poetry has been central to social
learning and the synchronization of social activities (the sea-shanty
or work-song is only the crudest and most obvious example).
Poetry, as we have seen, enforces cooperation between left-brain
temporal organization and right-brain spatial organization and helps to
bring about that integrated stereoscopic view that we call true
understanding. And poetry is, par excellence,
"kalogenetic"-productive of beauty, of elegant, coherent, and
predictively powerful models of the world.

It might be argued-and this is a traditional charge against poetry-that
in doing all these things poetry deceives us, presenting to us an
experience which, because it is so perfectly designed for the human
brain, gives us a false impression of reality and separates us from the
rough world in which we must survive. Much modern esthetic theory
is in fact devoted to reversing this situation, and making poetry-and
art in general-so disharmonious with our natural proclivities that it
shocks us into awareness of the stark realities. Clearly a poetry
which was too merely harmonious would be insipid-for it would
disappoint the brain's habituative desire for novelty. But mere
random change and the continuous disappointment of expectations is
itself insipid; we are as capable of becoming habituated to meaningless
flux as to mindless regularity.

Modernist esthetic theory may be ignoring the following possibility:
that our species' special adaptation may in fact be to expect more
order and meaning in the world than it can deliver; and that those
expectations may constitute, paradoxically, an excellent survival
strategy. We are strongly motivated to restore the equilibrium
between reality and our expectations by altering reality so as to
validate our models of it-to "make the world a better place," as we put
it. The modernist attack on beauty in art would therefore
constitute an attack on our very nature itself; and the modernist and
post-modernist criticism of moral and philosophical idealism likewise
flies in the face of the apparent facts about human neural
organization. What William James called "the will to believe" is
written in our genes; teleology is the best policy; and paradoxically,
it is utopian to attempt to do battle against our natural
idealism. Much more sensible to adjust reality to the ideal.

But our discussion of the effects of metered verse on the human brain
has ignored, so far, the subcortical levels of brain activity.
Let us substitute, as pars pro toto, "metered verse" for "rituals" in
the following summary by Barbara Lex:

The raison d'etre of rituals is the readjustment of dysphasic
biological and social rhythms by manipulation of neurophysiological
structures under controlled conditions. Rituals properly executed
promote a feeling of well-being and relief, not only because prolonged
or intense stresses are alleviated, but also because the driving
techniques employed in rituals are designed to sensitize and "tune" the
nervous system and thereby lessen inhibition of the right hemisphere
and permit temporary right-hemisphere dominance, as well as mixed
trophotropic-ergotropic excitation, to achieve synchronization of
cortical rhythms in both hemispheres and evoke trophotropic rebound.22

Lex maintains that the "driving" techniques of rhythmic dances, chants,
and so on can produce a simultaneous stimulation of both the ergotropic
(arousal) and the trophotropic (rest) systems of the lower nervous
system, producing subjective effects which she characterizes as
follows: trance; ecstasy; meditative and dreamlike states; possession;
the "exhilaration accompanying risk taking"; a sense of community;
sacredness; a "process of reviving the memory of a repressed unpleasant
experience and expressing in speech and actions the emotions related to
it, thereby relieving the personality of its influence"; alternate
laughing and crying; mystical experience and religious conversion;
experiences of unity, holism, and solidarity. Laughlin and
d'Aquili add to these effects a sense of union with a greater power, an
awareness that death is not to be feared, a feeling of harmony with the
universe, and a mystical "conjunctio oppositorum" or unity of
opposites. This list closely resembles our earlier enumeration of
the experience of good metered verse as described by literary people.

If Lex is right, we can add to the more specifically cortical effects
of metered verse the more generalized functions of a major ritual
driving technique: the promotion of biophysiological stress-reduction
(peace) and social solidarity (love). Meter clearly synchronizes
not only speaker with hearer, but hearers with each other, so that each
person's three-second "present" is in phase with the others and a
rhythmic community, which can become a perfomative community, is
generated.

Laughlin and d'Aquili connect the mythical mode of narrative with the
driving techniques of ritual, pointing out that mythical thought
expresses the "cognitive imperative," as they call it, or the desire
for an elegant and meaningful explanation of the world;23 and McManus
argues that such practices are essential in the full development and
education of children.24 (Again we might point out that the modernist
praise of mythical thought is misplaced; for it values the irrational
element it discerns in myth, whereas true mythical thought, as
Levi-Strauss has shown, is deeply rational and has much in common with
scientific hypothesis.)

The theory of the state-boundedness of memory might also explain the
remarkable memorability of poetry. If meter evokes a peculiar
brain state, and if each meter and each use of meter with its unique
variations carries its own mood or brain-state signature, then it is
not surprising that we can recall poetry so readily. The meter
itself can evoke the brain-state in which we first heard the poem, and
therefore make the verbal details immediately accessible to
recall. Homer said that the muses were the daughters of memory,
and this may be what he meant. By contrast, the modernist critic
Chatman sneeringly dismisses the mnemonic function of metered poetry as
being in common with that of advertising jingles. But if
advertising jingles are left holding the field of human emotional
persuasion, poetry has surely lost the battle-or the advertising
jingles have become the only true poetry.

To sum up the general argument of this essay: metered poetry is a
cultural universal, and its salient feature, the three-second LINE, is
tuned to the three-second present moment of the auditory
information-processing system. By means of metrical variation,
the musical and pictorial powers of the right brain are enlisted by
meter to cooperate with the linguistic powers of the left; and by
auditory driving effects, the lower levels of the nervous system are
stimulated in such a way as to reinforce the cognitive functions of the
poem, to improve the memory, and to promote physiological and social
harmony. Metered poetry may play an important part in developing
our more subtle understandings of time, and may thus act as a technique
to concentrate and reinforce our uniquely human tendency to make sense
of the world in terms of values like truth, beauty, and goodness.
Meter breaks the confinement of linguistic expression and appreciation
within two small regions of the left temporal lobe and brings to bear
the energies of the whole brain.25

The consequences of this new understanding of poetic meter are very
wide-ranging. This understanding would endorse the classical
conception of poetry, as designed to "instruct by delighting," as Sir
Philip Sidney put it.26 It would suggest strongly that "free verse,"
when uncoupled from any kind of metrical regularity, is likely to forgo
the benefits of bringing the whole brain to bear. It would also
predict that free verse would tend to become associated with views of
the world on which the tense-structure has become very rudimentary and
the more complex values, being time-dependent, have disappeared.
A bureaucratic social system, requiring specialists rather than
generalists, would tend to discourage reinforcement techniques such as
metered verse, because such techniques put the whole brain to use and
encourage world-views that might transcend the limited values of the
bureaucratic system; and by the same token it would encourage
activities like free verse, which are highly specialized both
neurologically and culturally. Prose, both because of its own
syntactical rhythms and because of its traditional liberty of topic and
vocabulary, is less highly specialized; though it is significant that
bureaucratic prose tends toward being arrhythmic and toward specialized
vocabulary. The effect of free verse is to break down the
syntactical rhythms of prose without replacing them by meter, and the
tendency of free verse has been toward a narrow range of vocabulary,
topic, and genre-mostly lyric descriptions of private and personal
impressions. Thus free verse, like existentialist philosophy, is
nicely adapted to the needs of the bureaucratic and even the
totalitarian state, because of its confinement of human concern within
narrow specialized limits where it will not be politically threatening.

The implications for education are very important. If we wish to
develop the full powers of the minds of the young, early and continuous
exposure to the best metered verse would be essential; for the higher
human values, the cognitive abilities of generalization and
pattern-recognition, the positive emotions such as love and
peacefulness, and even a sophisticated sense of time and timing, are
all developed by poetry. Furthermore, our ethnocentric bias may
be partly overcome by the study of poetry in other languages, and the
recognition if the underlying universals in poetic meter. Indeed,
the pernicious custom of translating foreign metered verse originals
into free verse may already have done some harm; it involves an
essentially arrogant assumption of western modernist superiority over
the general "vulgar" human love of regular verse.

It may well be that the rise of utilitarian education for the working
and middle classes, together with a loss of traditional folk poetry,
had a lot to do with the success of political and economic tyranny in
our times. The masses, starved of the beautiful and complex
rhythms of poetry, were only too susceptible to the brutal and
simplistic rhythms of the totalitarian slogan or advertising
jingle. An education in verse will tend to produce citizens
capable of using their full brains coherently, able to unite rational
thought and calculation with values and commitment.